Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecky
A kammback - which is basically a truncated boat tail - is probably most appropriate, as freebeard is suggesting.
Aerodynamics is a bit of a dark art, as far as I can tell. Although there are plenty of design guidelines that work reliably, you'll find that intuition often doesn't work with complex shapes. You can be pretty certain that, although the tiny kamm on the back may poke out of the profile, it almost certainly lowers drag overall, or Toyota wouldn't have put it there. The RAV is a very complicated shape, and the kamm could be correcting for something like the mirrors, or perhaps the windshield angle is too steep for there to be attached flow along the front of the roof, but it reattaches at the rear. Without doing extensive testing, you just can't know.
It's not a technical article, but I was amused by this recent post on Jalopnik:
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Ralph Gilles,who was responsible for the design of the SRT Viper refers to the E-Type shape as 'extreme cab-rearward'.
They can't produce low drag but stylists love 'em.
In the day,The E-type would have been low in drag,and with only 16-plus square-feet frontal area,the drag index wold be quite favorable.
Consider an MG TC,with Cd 0.75!